This essay explores sustainable consumption and considers possible roles for marketing and consumer researchers and public policy makers in addressing the many sustainability challenges that pervade the planet. Future research approaches to this interdisciplinary topic must be comprehensive and systematic and would benefit from a variety of different perspectives. There are several opportunities for further research; the authors explore three areas in detail. First, they consider the inconsistency between the attitudes and behaviors of consumers with respect to sustainability. Second, they broaden the agenda to explore the role of individual citizens in society. Third, they propose a macroinstitutional approach to fostering sustainability. For each of these separate, but interrelated, opportunities, the authors examine the area in detail and consider possible research avenues and public policy initiatives.

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet's life-support systems. These profound changes have led Earth System scientists to argue we have now entered a new geological epoch -the Anthropocene. In this introductory article to the Special Issue, we first set out the origins of the Anthropocene and some of the key debates around this concept within the physical and social sciences. We then explore five key organizing narratives that inform current economic, technological, political and cultural understandings of the Anthropocene and link these to the contributions in this Special Issue. We argue that the Anthropocene is the crucial issue for organizational scholars to engage with in order to not only understand on-going anthropogenic problems but also help create alternative forms of organizing based on realistic Earth-human relations.

This paper explores the performative role of marketing knowledge in advertising planning. It is based on an ethnography within the account planning department of a London advertising agency as it worked closely with a client and a market research agency to develop a new energy/health drink for launch in the UK. The case provides detailed support for the idea that marketing (and other) theories help perform or bring into existence that which they purport to describe. It also shows how such theories are hybridised and streamlined in the iterative battleground of a creative process, framed by the need to create plausible consumption and competitive relations. The main contribution of this paper is to show how the performative power of marketing knowledge is ultimately determined not by its 'truth value', but by its ability to produce compelling stories that stabilize the reflexive relationships between product attributes, consumer profiles and competitive relations.

Nottingham and an MSc in Management and Marketing from Lancaster University. James Freund is a lecturer at Lancaster University Management School. His research is focussed on Brand Psychoanalysis, i.e. exploring conscious and repressed aspects of organizations, including what images created by external critical stakeholders reveal about the organisational unconscious. He is also researching the role organizational personae play in helping and hindering appropriate responses to climate change. James has a BSc in psychology, and an MA and PhD in creative writing. He previously worked for metals firms Titanium International and Edward, Day & Baker, environmental charities Earth 2000 and Greenpeace, advertising agency FCB, and communications company BT. Luis Araujo is a Professor of Industrial Marketing at Lancaster University Management School. His research interests and publications are in the area of business markets, namely the boundaries of the firm and product-service systems. His recent work focuses on a practice-based approach to the study of markets. He is co-editor with John Finch and Hans Kjellberg of Reconnecting Marketing to Markets (Oxford University Press, 2010). AbstractThis paper explores the performative role of marketing knowledge in advertising planning. It is based on an ethnography within the account planning department of a London advertising agency as it worked closely with a client and a market research agency to develop a new energy/health drink for launch in the UK. The case provides detailed support for the idea that marketing (and other) theories help perform or bring into existence that which they purport to describe. It also shows how such theories are hybridised and streamlined in the iterative battleground of a creative process, framed by the need to create plausible consumption and competitive relations. The main contribution of this paper is to show how the performative power of marketing knowledge is ultimately determined not by its 'truth value', but by its ability to produce compelling stories that stabilize the reflexive relationships between product attributes, consumer profiles and competitive relations.

No abstract